New Kennedy Center, new repertoire.
There was a sequence where Eliza Douglas, Imhof’s former partner and frequent collaborator, removed her shirt, lay on the floor, and ran a black marker across her nude back. There was a part in which one performer, the talented actress Talia Ryder, intoned the Jeremih song “Paradise” live, and another in which she and another cast member sprawled out together on a dirtied mattress strewn with shattered iPhones. There were many moments in which Douglas and others vaped, puffing strawberry-scented mist into the audience…
Her performers are stony-faced misfits who somnambulantly drift around, occasionally enacting balletic choreographies along the way. The entire performance has the cooler-than-thou vibe of a Balenciaga runway show, replete with a range of rail-thin zillennials in baggy jeans; it has all the surface-level appeal of a Vogue slideshow devoted to one of those events, too…
Why does one performer receive a back tattoo—seemingly for real, with no makeup or special effects—on top of an SUV?…
It’s glib, dull, and hopeless, and it expresses itself well within its first half hour, during a scene where the cast shouts in unison: “We’re fucked, we’re doomed, we’re dead. I think I made you up inside my head.”
What started as an art show near Juan Tabo and Constitution quickly spiraled into a chaotic scene filled with gunshots and ended with a multi-vehicle car crash.
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This first sentence could be a template for future NM cultural events.
What started as a classroom discussion of Husserl’s influence on Merleau-Ponty quickly spiraled into a chaotic scene filled with gunshots and ended with scattered dismembered bodies.
What started as a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Swans” quickly spiraled into a chaotic scene filled with gunshots and ended with a pile of bloody tutus.
… Moonrise Kingdom, has died.
… during their visit yesterday to the Philadelphia Museum. With its dark lighting and massive interior columns, the building seemed to UD pretty oppressive.
And as for the Cassatt exhibit: The commentary kept telling us her mother/baby stuff is not not not sentimental.
Okay….
… UD‘s evil parents kept in their house for the moral undoing of their children the songs of Tom Lehrer.
From the age of nine onward, UD has been singing nonstop his greatest hits, so she’s intrigued by a new British play about him, Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You. The playwright pens a fine appreciation of Lehrer here, featuring Lehrer’s comment on his artistic output: “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worthwhile.”
Engraving: “That’ll teach her
to wear her hijab correctly next time.”
Beware the evil stepmother.
Prosecutors say the Wildenstein family pulled off “the longest and most sophisticated tax fraud” in the history of modern France in part [due] to their savvy use of storage: artworks were scattered across multiple countries, shell corporations, and innocuous holding facilities such as a nuclear bunker in the Catskill Mountains, a former fire station in New York, and sites in the Bahamas and the Channel Islands.
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Clever headline!
ART STASH SET FOR AN HEIR RAID
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… on all of whose surfaces appear the very greatest art the world has ever known.
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La Kid and Mr UD gesticulate down the street from the museum.
UD felt self-congratulatory, getting to the end of this sentence in one piece.
Longtime readers know some of UD’s musical enthusiasms: Among singers, Julia Lezhneva; among pianists, Yuja Wang. UD tried to score a ticket for Wang’s upcoming Rachmaninoff blowout but failed.
I love the observation Wang makes in my headline: When a genius is fully inside of a musical piece, it becomes hers.
In my own primitive playing and singing of Purcell’s song Music for A While, I’ve felt something (very distantly) like this: The notes and the emotions and the ideas sometimes flow out of you so spontaneously and deeply — in such a known way — when you’ve played (and in my case sung) a piece so many times, that the fact of a person named Sergei or Henry actually empirically sweating the thing out vanishes completely, and it’s you and this music that your throat and fingers and soul squeeze out. And shouldn’t that be what the geniuses who wrote the stuff want? They didn’t just generate a ditty; they moved a collection of notes and silences into some generous super-artistic realm of universal expressivity.
Think of what James Axton, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names, says about the Parthenon:
I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embedded in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice which is our own.
In great art (architecture) there is some value-added thing, some permanent, accessible … cry for pity, say; and if you enter and listen hard and vulnerably enough, you can not only hear it. You can reproduce it. You can even feel as if you are generating it anew.
Their blastula’s Fetal Prelude will emerge in ghostly notation on its ultrasounds.
There’s Joyce DiDonato’s voice, on display the other night at The Hours:
[I]t is hard to focus on anyone else when DiDonato is onstage, often standing magnetically still. Her voice is clear in fast conversation, as she darkly relishes the words. Then, as the lines slow and expand, her tone grows smoky yet grounded, mellow yet potent. She plays Virginia [Woolf] as solemn and severe, but with a dry wit; if anything, she comes off as almost too robust to make paralyzing depression entirely plausible.
DiDonato is a commanding enough singer and presence to render persuasive what had seemed in [an earlier production] like bombastic overkill: a booming fantasy of London, a crashing evocation of incapacitating headaches. It’s only at the very top of its range that her voice tightens a bit; all in all, though, she gives a generous, noble portrayal, at its peak in her crushing delivery of lines from Woolf’s suicide note.
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I mean. If this doesn’t give you goosebumps with today’s roast goose…